Family stories and research stories that tell the tale of my personal research. If you have a similar family line or want to know more. Please contact me!

Friday, February 17, 2012

Johnson DNA

Since it is President’s Day weekend coming up, I thought I
would talk about my relationship with one particular President, Andrew
Johnson. Andrew Johnson was born in North Carolina to
Jacob Johnson and Mary McDonough and moved to Tennessee as a young man where he
married Eliza McCardle. He became
Abraham Lincoln’s Vice President in the 1864 election and after Lincoln’s assassination,
he became President. He also became the
first President to be impeached.
President Johnson was definitely not one of our more successful
Presidents. However, the story how we
proved our connection to him is rather interesting.

We had had circumstantial proof of the relationship for
several years. Around 2001, I received an
article published by Hugh B. Johnston which quoted a letter written by
Henderson Johnson, my great great grandfather’s older brother. The letter mentions all of the family members
and is addressed to Cousin Andrew. Not
too long after that, I got an actual copy of the letter from a descendant of
Henderson Johnson. Fast forward to 2009…I
was contacted by the Johnson DNA group wanting to know if I knew of anyone who
could be tested as a direct male relative of President Andrew Johnson. When DNA is researched on a specific family
line, you need a direct male line to test.
There is no direct male line that traces back to Andrew Johnson. He had sons, but only his daughters had
children. So, therefore the Y-DNA test
wouldn’t work on a direct descendant of Andrew Johnson. However, it would work if someone could find
a descendant of Andrew’s brother, William Patterson Johnson or through a
descendant of one of his father’s brothers.
I offered up my father as someone who was descended from Moses Johnson,
a younger brother of Jacob Johnson. I
was questioned if I had any documentation.
I offered up a copy of the letter and the research including census
records that record members of the family up until my grandfather’s
lifetime. While I agreed that the connection
was circumstantial, it was pretty convincing.
Now someone might have been offended that their research was being
questioned…I was not. Mostly because I
already had the research to back it up and I was well aware of how many people
claimed to be related to someone famous and had nothing to back it up.

After some thought, they decided to test my Dad for
free. His DNA test would be the one they
could use to test a connection to Andrew Johnson. They still wanted to get someone tested who
was descended from William Patterson Johnson, Andrew’s brother. They asked me if I could help and I said that
I would do what I could. Soon after they
sent me some information that they found that listed the children of William Patterson
Johnson. I thought that the information
looked very familiar and then looked at the source of the information and found
my own website listed as the source. I
personally found this incredible funny…to have my own research sent back to me
as a source.

With a bit of work and luck – we did eventually find that
descendant of William Patterson Johnson and he was also tested. He and my father’s tests matched and provided
us with a scientific confirmation of the relationship. Along the way, a descendant of Silvanus Johnson
was tested. It was always thought that
Andrew Johnson was possibly descended from Silvanus and this was a line that
was in most genealogies or histories about Andrew Johnson. Unfortunately for us…DNA told us that there
is no connection. So, here we are with a line that probably only traces back to
a William Johnson who was probably the father of both Jacob Johnson and my
great great great grandfather Moses Johnson as well as a few other
brothers. As of right now, we can’t take
it any further but there are some tantalizing DNA similarities with some other
Johnson lines that might lead us further back.
DNA research in our circumstances has proven a valuable tool. It has confirmed the lines from William
Johnson down and dismissed the line going back.
Who knows what we will ever find?
Andrew Johnson’s family was not wealthy and there isn’t a wealth of data
to search on that will give us many answers.
You might say the paper trail is cold.
Perhaps science will provide us more answers as we learn more about DNA
results.